Memento Park Page 4

  I sat back in my chair, awash in my newly uncovered ancestry. An hour earlier, for all I had known, I’d sprung from the brow of my parents, sui generis, and suddenly I was Marley’s ghost, dragging behind me an eternal chain forged through the centuries by people who could not have guessed at my existence. Nor I theirs, evidently. Where there had been nothing before, now there was family. My family. My murdered forebears.

  It’s all right to sneer, Virgil. After all, where did I imagine I came from? I’d given the document and its stark contents so little consideration when I received it. Why was I so incurious, so content to be ignorant for so long? I looked back at the photo I had retrieved from the garage and thought of the cataclysm gathering beyond my grandparents’ increasingly frail walls.

  So many names. I bowed my head toward the file and fixed my energy on them, as though my belated guilt could erase decades of neglect, my efforts punctuated by the occasional snore issuing from the bedroom. Szabo. Lowenheim. Who were these lost people? What had unfolded between the b and d that bookended each slight entry? Eventually, I returned the tree to its folder and stowed it in my drawer, uncertain what to do with it next. It had told much more than I’d imagined, but much less than I’d needed.

  THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH OF HITLER in which he stands before some so-called degenerate art, looted from its Jewish owners. The painting that has drawn his attention is a self-portrait of Kálmán as a soldier on crutches, one leg torn away, his ham-hock stump tattered and exposed. It conveys Kálmán’s penetrating terror of the first great European war, into which he was swept. The painting is arresting in its raw vulnerability, his pallor the color of urine, his face pierced again by those flat, vacant eyes that mark most of his interwar paintings. Of course, it’s easy to see who the true degenerate in the photo is. There’s a Neanderthal vacancy in the idiot grins of der Führer and his drooling cohort as they stand, braying like asses, in front of paintings they are ill-suited to grasp, a mocking that must surely conceal the rage they feel at their bewilderment. Wherever he was at the moment—the timeline suggests a Davos sanatorium—Kálmán must have shuddered under the scrutiny, felt the footfall upon his grave.

  This is all conjecture, true, but conjecture is all I have left. Please, sir. Just the facts. Rachel, too, was concerned with the facts. At first. And in the end, facts provided little comfort for Tracy. All right, Virgil, you plodder. The agreed-upon facts about Budapest Street Scene are these:

  It was painted by Kálmán in 1925, the period during which scholars agree he was at the height of his creative powers, a leading figure in the European avant-garde, despite his refusal to relocate to Paris permanently. This refusal most likely bought him the mixed blessing of four more years of unhappy life, keeping him out of the Nazis’ grasp until 1944. The painting was sold in 1927 to a thriving coffee merchant named Imre Weisz, following its appearance in a group show at Budapest’s renowned Geszti Gallery. The Weisz family owned Budapest Street Scene until 1944, the year in which Kálmán took his life, the Germans took Budapest, and the painting disappeared along with all the other Weisz assets and, finally, the Weisz family itself. It did not reappear until 1967, when it surfaced in the collection of Cassian Yuhaus.

  Into this narrative I was now obliged to insert the story of my grandfather, who somehow came into possession of the painting after Weisz, and tried to use it to buy his family’s way to freedom, too late, too terribly late. After that, via routes yet unknown, the painting traveled from Halasz to Yuhaus, but the real mystery, though scarcely the only one, was how my grandfather got his paint-stained hands on it to begin with. The easiest solution surely would be to call my father and inquire.

  Ah. Easy. According to what facile definition of the word? There was nothing easy that passed between us. I was afraid of him as a boy, terror unmixed with the admiration my friends felt for their fathers, and—snicker though you might, Virgil—in truth, I feared him still. Not in the same way, not in so primal a manner—when I was a boy, the sound of his approach down the hallway could make the hair rise on my neck—but fear, nonetheless. Perhaps that’s why Kálmán’s terrified, crippled soldier moved me so. No, calling him and asking would not, in fact, be easy at all. My mother, however, was a different story.

  But her answer to my questions about Budapest Street Scene, about the Lowenheims and the Ujvaris, was the same opaque reply she’d given me throughout the years whenever I ventured the occasional query about our inscrutable patriarch:

  “Ask your father.”

  There was something touching about my mother’s refusal to discuss anything more to do with my father or his family, a naive belief in the restorative value of clean breaks. Her break could not have been cleaner. When she divorced my father five years earlier, the timing, like most things to do with my mother’s second act, was dramatic, unexpected, bordering on the melodramatic. Within a month, she was ensconced in a Paris apartment, having a go of it as, yes, a painter, sustained by alimony and an unflappable self-regard. I’d given her experiment a year, but she was still plugging away out of a small studio in the nineteenth arrondissement, and even enjoying a modest success, at least by the Churchillian measure of leaping from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. By dint of sheer perseverance, a tiny circle within a circle within a circle of Parisian art types had begun to take notice of her, which only reinforced her willfulness. And so, she was disinclined to make things easy on me.

  “Ask your father.” Ask your alleged father, when she was feeling mischievous.

  “I’m asking you. At transatlantic rates, I might add.”

  “You can afford them, son.”

  Her interest in the topic of Budapest Street Scene exhausted, my mother commenced one of her conversational free-for-alls, something I have never had patience for even when the calls were local. She tends to burble on, free-associating all manner of topics long past my fragile point of interest. This monologue included complaints about yet another Paris metro strike; a detailed recapitulation of a standoff between my mother and her landlord, an avowed anti-Semite, she was convinced; a tiresome extended review of a gallery show by one of her artist friends; and something to do with her acceptance to a prestigious artists’ retreat somewhere in the Pyrénées.

  “Bliss,” she sighed. “No phones, no TV, no radio, no Internet. Nothing but total isolation, light, and painting for a month.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Matt, are you even listening?”

  “Hmm? Yeah. What—”

  “Honestly, I don’t know why you call. How’s Tracy? Still charmed by your attentiveness?”

  “For the moment,” I answered, ignoring her sarcasm. “Mom, please, about this painting—”

  “Ask. Your. Father.”

  My mother confuses me, although this was not always the case. During my childhood, there was something comforting if unexciting about her. Although as I cast my mind back across those years, I am once again hard-pressed to fill in too many details. She was a terrible cook with, even worse, a limited culinary range, so it wasn’t just bad food, it was the same bad food over and over again. I would like to say she tried, but I’m not sure that’s true, and I’m also not sure she ever cared about just how dreadful it all was. To her, another dry pork cutlet was good enough.

  She was indifferent to the news of the world. American-born, she didn’t share my father’s sense of urgency about the Communist threat. I remember taking him to see the Big Sur coastline during one of our few, doomed attempts at bonding. Looking out across the endless expanse of sheer cliffs and boiling surf, he muttered, “The Ruskis would love to get their hands on this.” And do what with it, I thought but did not say. My mother, at least, would have enjoyed the view. She drank moderately, which was when I found her most entertaining, as she was especially gifted at impersonating my father’s Hungarian circle, not just their accents but their blowhard bonhomie. Not a sentimental woman, my mother. In the baby book she threw together to commemorate my birth, she entered
the following physical description: Ugly. big nose. My mother, to be fair, insists she wrote Ugly, big nose, the “ugly” intended to modify “nose” and not to serve as a blanket appraisal of my appearance. Like constitutional lawyers parsing the second amendment, we have debated the existence and significance of that comma for years. I see it as a period, but perhaps that is how I want to see it.

  And then, without warning, she changed. No, changed is too mild, she transformed. In the year leading up to her divorce she emerged a full-blown, middle-aged bohemian. She was nowhere to be found for all the museum openings and opera outings, and the ancient Singer sewing machine that had rattled throughout my childhood, the sort that disappeared as though through a trapdoor beneath the table, was replaced with canvases, paints, charcoals, watercolors. I wondered what my father made of all this. I imagine it would have felt like a provocation. I’m not sure my mother didn’t intend it that way. She was usurping the family business, and now the house was filled with the smells of oil paints and linseed oil, not from my father’s work-stained clothes but from her increasingly inspired canvases.

  By then I was living in Los Angeles, my career well established, but I would visit them from time to time and found myself unable to recognize my mother. I was secretly amused by my father’s irritation at her hitherto-unseen displays of will, of opinion, of independence. But if I am honest, the change discomfited me as well, and when my mother first announced she was leaving my father, I was caught off guard by what now seems an entirely logical denouement of the little melodrama she had cast herself in. I tried to get details, to have her explain to me this rupture, but then as now her rejoinder was ineluctable:

  “Ask your father.”

  Will it surprise you, Virgil, to learn that I did no such thing?

  My mother had finished her exegesis on the Parisian art scene and executed another one of her high-wire conversational shifts. “You know, I’m looking at my phone book,” she murmured, “and there are ten dead people in it already. Ten. That’s depressing. There are too many dead people in my phone book.”

  “Mom, please. Can we have just like a second on point here?”

  She paused for a moment, and I could imagine her posing with her cigarette—another habit adopted late in life—looking out her tiny window with its fractional view of Sacré-Coeur, deciding how much to reveal. I considered my own contrasting view: Through the window of my study, I could see Tracy in the garden, cell phone propped against her ear, making her weekly effort at resuscitating our rosebush that had, to date, resisted all her ministrations. I heard a flutter of a sigh, like moth wings flapping, and my mother began talking.

  “You know, this flat reminds me a little of the awful apartment I had in the Haight back in the late sixties—”

  “You lived in San Francisco? I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course you did. I’ve told you that before. Many times. Anyway, I was in San Francisco and I was in an apartment that was always either too cold or too warm and never at the right times. And I distinctly recall…”

  My mother spoke on, another monologue, her performance specialty, and my attention drifted. I tried to imagine her living in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s in paisley blouses and heart-shaped glasses, dispensing free love and smoking pot in her rickety walk-up, but I couldn’t make the image cohere. She was saying something about a man and an offer of marriage, but now my attention had settled back on Tracy down in the yard, struggling with her rosebush. In the past, there was something touching about her refusal to give up, although I was certain that no rose would ever bloom on her benighted branch. Now, however, there was something about her dedication that irritated me. Sweating in the sunlight, cell phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, her taut biceps twitched with effort, her stomach flat even as she leaned over. If this had been one of those awful movies I make my living appearing in, she would have felt my eyes upon her and looked up at me. But she remained bowed over her project, talking urgently to Brian, surely.

  I could tell from my mother’s cadence that her story was coming to an end.

  “… but, of course, by then it was too late, and I never got the chance again. And that, my son”—she closed with a flourish—“is your father in a nutshell. Do you see?”

  I realized she was waiting for a reply. Hot, angry sweat pricked my forehead. She’d told me something, something key in her estimation, and I’d missed it. Now, knowing my mother and her fallible sense of the critical, it’s possible that, in fact, whatever it was she’d told me was tangential, or not even relevant. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Which accounts for my habit of tuning her out. I imagine an accounting of the moments I have glossed over in a similar fashion would keep the recording angel busy indeed, a damning encyclopedia of regret. Whether her story contained a warning, advice, a benediction, I would never know, it was lost to me now, and my vanity, or something more sinister, ensured it would stay lost. How easy it would have been, I now understand, to have donned my most confiding voice and say, “Mom, forgive me, I was looking out the window at my fiancée and was so captivated that I missed all that. Can you tell me again?” She would have liked that. It would have sat well with her romantic disposition.

  “Okay. Something to think about,” I ventured. “Thanks.”

  I hung up the phone with vague promises about a future visit. I glanced back out the window into the garden. Tracy, deep in conversation, had abandoned her roses but not her phone. I tried to get her attention, wanted to wave, blow a kiss perhaps, but she remained absorbed in her call and didn’t turn around.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the Mockley interview, I still hadn’t spoken to my father. Instead, I invested my time and energy in becoming an authority on Ervin Laszlo Kálmán, who, though dead, seemed far more approachable. I filled pages upon pages with dates, places, names of intimates, all manner of historical data. The pages were cross-referenced and color-coded—one has a good deal of time on one’s hands between takes on a film set. On a separate sheet beside these, as a comparison, I thought it would be interesting to write down every related fact I could recall about my father. I have kept that single, limp sheet, have it with me still, crumpled in my pants pocket, although there is no need for me to look at it. Its silent reproach has accompanied me on this journey, traveling to Budapest, to New York, to my father’s hospital room, to Rabbi Wolfe’s congregation in Chicago, to Rachel’s bed. I could, at any number of moments, have begun to fill up that lonely page, but it remains blank to this day. Rachel asked about it, finding it among my belongings in my little Hungarian hotel room. I saw pity in her eyes as I explained.

  My Kálmán archive—which now contained a certified letter from the World Jewish Congress bearing a referral to a law firm well versed in matters of restitution and prepared to offer any required legal assistance in recovering Budapest Street Scene—was installed in my trailer, where similar archives in similar trailers had been situated over the years. My entire education has unfolded in tiny mobile units like this one, filling the endless numbing hours of downtime reading all the books I could get my hands on. There was the summer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald while I worked on a tent-pole science fiction movie for Warner Bros. I remember reading all of Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf during my one year as a series regular. I became obsessed with quantum mechanics and read dozens of books I didn’t really understand while I had a recurring role on a popular sitcom. Along that continuum, my Kálmán obsession was merely my latest in a series of distractions. That’s always been my method, if I can be said to have one, using each new job to hole up and continue my irregular learning, plugging up the potholes of my scattershot education.

  I was in the middle of a recurring guest role on a hot new cable drama set in an American embassy in China. Two episodes into a five-episode commitment, with a character with a name, and an actual “arc” (I was set to transform from amoral to honest). It was the kind of role that might bring awards, reviews, that elusive next level of recognition. Mostly, th
ough, I had time on my hands. I have been successful in my profession long enough that my on-set accommodations, though modest, are comfortable. There is a hierarchy of these things on a film set, as with all creature comforts, doled out in quality and quantity according to one’s station, and the muscle of one’s representation. Do I stare covetously at the deluxe, plush, lined trailers of my A-list costars, their refrigerators an endless bounty of ambrosia and elixirs? Of course I do. Or, rather, I used to. I’ve learned to modulate envy, reconciling myself to my permanent C-list status. It’s an essential survival skill in Hollywood, where someone is always doing better than you are, and more often than not it’s someone you loathe. That kind of eternal tote board can consign you to madness, so I have concluded over time that being on the list in any capacity is preferable to the alternative. As long as my tiny refrigerator is stocked with the bottled water of my choice (Volvic) and I have a quiet place to read, I count my blessings and remind myself that my paint-stained father actually had to work for a living.

  It was Kálmán’s father’s work—he was a tailor of some distinction—that brought the family the two hundred kilometers west to Budapest from Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city. It was 1891 and Ervin was eight years old. Three years later he entered the gymnasium, the prestigious Hungarian secondary school, where his teachers encouraged his artistic inclinations, to the consternation of his parents, who envisioned a more traditional vocational path for their sensitive son. It was in reluctant accordance with their wishes, a schism that Ervin never fully resolved or forgave, that he entered technical college in 1904, but the brief exposure to art had done its work.

  I was sitting in my trailer, waiting to be called to reshoot a scene—a rarity but something that had been happening with increasing frequency on this project, the director somehow unable to get what he was looking for from me—when I realized that I had only a vague memory that my father hadn’t finished university, but I could not remember where he had matriculated. Had it been a trade college, too? Had he told me and I’d forgotten? More likely, I had never known the answer. I certainly had no idea where he’d gone for his primary education, or when. For that matter, I was also unsure whether his family was born in Budapest or arrived from elsewhere, like the Kálmáns. I pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and labeled it, simply, Dad. A production assistant knocked and advised me that I would be needed on set in ten minutes. I pulled one of the timelines I had assembled about Kálmán’s life, set it beside Dad, and looked at it more closely.